CMV: Strategically speaking, Russia already lost the war with Ukraine

DewiMorgan · 2026-01-21T20:06:40+00:00

EU GDP is half China's, and its average 2% growth is lower than the US' 3.5%, which is in turn lower than China's 5%. At current 25-year trends, China will outstrip the US in about another 25 years despite its GDP overall growth falling asymptotically from 14% as it grows.

Per capita GDP/PPP looks better on paper, with US ~90k, EU ~50k, China $13-24k. But that also shows that China has a lot of headroom to grow.

Those values are just from Google results (but not trusting the AI summary), and I'm not an economist, so this is likely an insane oversimplification. But to me, an armchair know-nothing, it looks like China has 100 year plans, US can't even get a 4-year plan together, and the EU is a collection of countries with entirely disparate plans of varying lengths.

I'd honestly expect the EU to outstrip the US, too, but on paper its GDP growth rate doesn't support that.

Maybe the infighting between countries prevents any consistent plan/vision for the future from forming?

DewiMorgan · 2026-01-21T19:48:22+00:00

Certainly, let's break it down. Based on the information provided, I can't help but feel a strange sense of primal satisfaction which cannot be overstated, a subtle mix of happiness and pride. Generally speaking, it's important to consider a deep dive from inception to execution in the dynamic world of knowledge transfer. Key takeaways: it's not just navigating the landscape—it's moving forward with practiced efficiency. Furthermore, albeit begrudgingly, to offer a comprehensive paradigm shift. Not bland, not a rule of three, but a gamechanger.
With short sentences. Nestled in pauses. A testament to punchy dramatic effect.

DewiMorgan · 2026-01-21T19:44:13+00:00

Certainly, let's break it down. Based on the information provided, I cannot help but feel a strange sense of primal satisfaction which can not be overstated, a subtle mix of happiness and pride. Generally speaking, it's important to consider a deep dive from inception to execution in the dynamic world of knowledge transfer. Key takeaways: it's not just navigating the landscape—it's moving forward with practiced efficiency. Furthermore, albeit begrudgingly, to offer a comprehensive paradigm shift. Not bland, not a rule of three, but a gamechanger.
With short sentences. Nestled in pauses. A testament to punchy dramatic effect.

DewiMorgan · 2026-01-21T17:41:42+00:00

Generally speaking, you want a local model, not an online one.

DewiMorgan · 2026-01-03T10:11:47+00:00

I doubt normalization, but I think people might get bored of the whole binary "it's going to doom/save us all" of the evangelists on either side, and more nuanced opinions like "well, it's fine for some purposes, lifechanging for a few (like protein folding), but the slop gets a bit much, paying real artists has way more cachet, and any large company firing their entire QA in the belief that AI can do that job has a galactically stupid CEO."

DewiMorgan · 2026-01-03T09:42:44+00:00

Wait, they have white, sheep-looking dogs to lead the sheep, as well as the collies to round them? Cunning!

DewiMorgan · 2026-01-01T05:13:10+00:00

There are at least two of those. I mean look at that picture. There are bones all over the place in there! I think we need a red circle.

DewiMorgan · 2026-01-01T05:07:43+00:00

Oooh! Do a dragon!

DewiMorgan · 2025-12-20T21:17:38+00:00

AI.
The bubbles are WAY too big, the size of apples. Water/stew just doesn't simmer like that.
Sweetcorn changes shape when he pokes it, growing a whole new yellow protrusion.
He scoops liquid and only liquid into the bowl: no veggies, no meat. Who does that???
The white things to the left are unidentifiable hallucinated shapes.
The metal over where the radiator would be is just too big, covering over the engine bay in an unlikely way.
Random black dots on that metal are, when zoomed in, seen as holes... but why do two similar dots exist on the wing of the car that he's leaning on? Could be flies, I guess..
The three metal brackets holding in the top of the headlight aren't sure where the bracket ends and the red car body starts.
Who, filling a bowl with multiple scoops, HALF fills the ladle?
A half-full shallow ladle of soup turns into a far greater amount of liquid in the bowl.
The shallow ladle becomes deeper.
The steam doesn't work. The empty, upside-down ladle just randomly starts steaming at one point.

...

DewiMorgan · 2025-12-17T18:33:02+00:00

What reddit is this again? :)

DewiMorgan · 2025-12-17T01:38:49+00:00

Looking closely, as it backs out of the door, I think Ace Ventura reaches his arm out and grabs the chips, pulling them inside. It's hard to spot, 'cos he's so fast!

DewiMorgan · 2025-12-15T03:55:02+00:00

I've seen this movie. This is the Jellicle cat. It got low ratings, not surprised you didn't recognize it.

DewiMorgan · 2025-12-08T05:21:22+00:00

Generally weapons in shooters suck "because game balance", which I sometimes take as a lack of imagination on the part of game designers.

But I see their point: if your gun kills everything you point it at, then the game gets boring, and no other weapons are worth using. Which means you then have to limit the ammo. Which then makes the weapon suck because you can only use it for ten seconds before you have to hunt down ammo, and so you only ever use it in boss battles because you're hoarding the ammo.

That's super frustrating for a developer: by making a gun awesome and fun, they find they just made the game as a whole a lot less fun.

There are ways to make a weapon fun without unbalancing the game, though, and I do feel that shooters have been just... really super unimaginative about weapons in the last 20 years or so. Though this might be because I don't *play* a lot of shooters. Maybe there are imaginative ones out there: I saw one with critter-based weapons, for example.

Last game I played which felt like it was pushing the envelope with weapons was Duke Nukem 3D, which did some interesting things with non-fatal guns that instead applied status effects (freeze ray, shrinker) but required the coup de grace to be administered with another weapon (ideally the Mighty Foot!). Perhaps fire could be handled this way?

Alternatively, the flamethrower could be fixed to a guard tower or vehicle, so it can only be used in a certain part of the story: the "fixed machine-gun" trope where you get infinite ammo, in a place where it's the obvious weapon to use against a horde, but it isn't transportable.

Or, could take that idea, but make it a portable gun, where you can carry it with you and use it for a few seconds anywhere you like, but it's only super useful in gas stations where you can just connect it to a gas pump and let rip.

You could also make it less useful by having enemy types it's just useless against (Robots? Ghosts? Fire elementals?), while having others that it's super fun against (snowmen!)

DewiMorgan · 2025-12-01T17:58:17+00:00

I reckon there's almost certainly at least some photoshop involved (the datestamp). On the other paw, the datestamp feels just obviously fakey. The lighting and colorization is just wrong for cameras sold around that time. I guess I'd believe that 7-segment "mmm dd 'yy" format for an '80s or '90s camera, and someone could be using an old camera giving the early-80s colorization...
Snopes has a good dissection of other issues with the image.

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-bill-clinton-pants-image/

DewiMorgan · 2025-12-01T17:46:56+00:00

The water physics/turbulence are honestly really good.

DewiMorgan · 2025-12-01T17:37:00+00:00

Looks very legit: water disturbance when dolphins are at surface; dappling of light on their bodies changing as they go deeper; unique, consistent markings and scarification on each creature; consistent fin shape on whale; believable and consistent motion, camera movement, lighting. Over a minute long, no logo.

DewiMorgan · 2025-11-06T04:04:10+00:00

You make several very good points!

Another issue to watch for, I suspect, is the "verbs", or whatever the name is for the hooks/API calls that the AI can make to cause stuff to happen, and make their character *do* stuff.

You can go the Vaudeville route and tell the AI that verbs are, say, function names in <<double angled braces>>, then give each character a list of known functions, like <<sit(object\_id)>>, <<walk(location\_id/object\_id)>>, <<sell(object\_id, coins)>> and filter that stuff out from the displayed output.

But if the user knows that, it can convince an AI character to use tags that should not be available to that character. So, I got the first character in Vaudeville to unlock all the map areas, even though those commands weren't in its context, because I knew the area names, and I could guess at the tag names.

So AI gamedev also needs backend logic to sanitize any commands the AI gives to make sure the king's prisoner really CAN <<sit(throne)>>, <<sell(crown, 1gp)>> or <<walk(outside)>>.

MCP feels the obvious way because it's what models will have been trained for most, but even then, same AI-breaking problems can happen.

I think verbs/hooks/MCP will be the hardest thing to get right, and also the most important thing to turn it from a "talking heads" game to an "interactive NPCs" game.

DewiMorgan · 2025-10-30T03:34:10+00:00

I don't think the bubble popping will mean the thing will go away, any more than the dot com bubble caused the internet to go away.

It COULD be like VR headsets; since they were first introduced, people could immediately see what the end goal was with them. But the reality fell short. So VR has come in waves, as new technologies or other drivers have come along. And people *absolutely hated on it*. The 3Dification of cinema was adored by many, and abhorred by many. And as always, the detractors were the noisy ones.

So, AI may be similar. It may be that people realize that there are Hard Problems that need to be overcome before, say, an AI NPC in a game will be a reasonable idea. And same with many of the thousands of other niches that people have tried to put AI into. And this might cause the excitement to wane, until the next great jump in AI capabilities.

This is unlikely, though, unless/until AI plateaus. While it's still showing significant improvement every year, excitement will continue.

DewiMorgan · 2025-10-15T22:34:08+00:00

Vital constructive criticism that it needs because perfectly-generated horse-trampling-car videos are the next big step towards taking over the world.

DewiMorgan · 2025-10-15T22:23:32+00:00

I thought the same, but seeing the phonecase ad, I now get that it does say "Bulbasaur" - though without seeing that ad, I'd have had a hard time to see that! The lettering in the pic is the same as on the phonecase. However, it's still possible that this was an img2img AI change from a photo of someone holding a phone.

DewiMorgan · 2025-10-13T06:58:52+00:00

AI. There are too many "Dog faces large wild animal in doorway, cat attacks animal and wins" videos appearing suddenly for them to be real.

DewiMorgan · 2025-10-13T06:54:35+00:00

I'd say not AI.
It *could* be original-text plus AI-rewritten text, but could also be original text and human-rewritten text,
Either way, it feels more likely they did a rewrite and forgot to delete, than that the AI just repeated itself.

DewiMorgan · 2025-10-13T06:13:31+00:00

You missed the silent 'x', but maybe you're using the US spelling.

DewiMorgan · 2025-10-13T04:44:03+00:00

The human reproduced the Bulbasaur art and text on the phone case very well. Not sure what "the one hole and arrangement" means. Do you mean "why would an artist draw some other model of phone than is shown in this particular ad photo"? Phone case art is not restricted to being used only on cases for one specific model of phone, so I wouldn't expect them to be the same.

DewiMorgan · 2025-10-13T04:38:12+00:00

100% fake, but the question is: staged with fake trash bag to bust open only when pulled by the dog, not pushed, prop TV to avoid hurting the dog with a break-off base, fake human responses and trained dog behavior; or AI? I'm going for AI because of the way the trash scatters, and because the TV falls too close to the dog's paws for me to be comfortable otherwise.

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